SPECIAL REPORT; School Sports' Last Rah-Rah?

FOR THE first time in the collective memory of Lorain, Ohio, autumn blew into the small, blue-collar town this year and no season of public high school football was there to greet it. No cheerleaders. No pep rallies. No football players hitting the field and each other in the name of school pride and personal glory.

"It feels kind of messed up," said Frank (Scooter) Shrieves, the 17-year-old quarterback for the Lorain High School Steelmen, who still wears his football jacket to school.

In Lorain, as in an increasing number of American school districts, student athletic programs are under siege. In recent months, a lingering national recession and a creeping unwillingness among taxpayers to pay yet more for public education have strained school budgets throughout much of the United States. More and more, school administrators complain that they are being pressured to choose between textbooks and touchdowns.

"It's made me sick to the stomach," said Thomas Bollin, superintendent of Lorain's 12,000-student system, about the deep cuts he made in school sports programs in March. When residents voted down a special levy that would have generated the necessary revenues, Mr. Bollin said he had no choice but to cancel sports.

In Chicago, a yawning education budget deficit prompted school officials to slash athletic budgets for its 64 high schools from an already tight $6,700 a year to $750. In Los Angeles, where transporting one team to play another costs on average more than $200, school officials trimmed athletic budgets by 20 percent as funding streams for education run dry. Communities in other states, including Arizona, Florida and Maryland, have endured similar cuts in school athletics.

In some schools, cuts have been accepted with resignation. Elsewhere, school officials have devised sometimes desperate ways to raise money.

In San Francisco, city officials passed a measure in January that placed a one-year-only surcharge on ticket sales for some professional sports to raise money to support local student athletics -- a first in the nation. High school sports were saved from extinction for at least a year, said Anne Herinline, commissioner of athletics for the city's junior and senior high schools.

Ms. Herinline added that the sports programs were being helped by a local group, Save High School Sports, which has raised more than $100,000 a year for supplies and equipment since it was founded in 1985 by Don Barksdale, a former player for the Boston Celtics. Still, she said, the school district will be "looking at the same black hole next year" as education revenues are outpaced by educational needs.

"How can you have sports programs if you don't have schools?" asked Linda Matsumoto, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Board of Education, which was forced by law to close a $315.8 million budget gap before schools could reopen this fall. "Unfortunately, we had to make some difficult cuts," Ms. Matsumoto said. "But learning takes place in the classroom between teacher and student. That relationship is sacrosanct."

Gary Marx, senior associate executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, said American public schools were increasingly confronting that fact of educational life. "Every administrator I talk to is concerned about what is happening in the academic program and coming up with adequate funding to hold their own," Mr. Marx said.

But Carey E. McDonald, executive consultant to the National High School Athletic Coaches Association, suggests that school officials are using cuts and threats of cuts to sports and other extracurricular programs as a ploy.

"Communities don't seem willing to fund the schools," said Mr. McDonald, who said he had been involved in student athletics for 45 years, "and administrators are smart enough to know that if they threaten to cut sports or band, they'll get support."

In Chicago, however, no rescuers have come running, said Lonnie Williams, the football coach at Martin Luther King Jr. High School on the city's South Side. The result, Mr. Williams said, is that the level of participation in athletics will fall, especially among low-income black students attending "ghetto schools" like Martin Luther King. Professional sports, long a showcase and marketplace for black athletes, will be beyond those students' reach. Cuts in high school sports today, Mr. Williams said, mean limited access to lucrative sports careers tomorrow.

Administrators fear that cutting sports programs may discourage some students from attending school at all because their dreams of becoming another Michael Jordan, the multimillionaire Chicago Bulls basketball star, will be dashed.

The alternatives, Mr. Williams said, are the gang and the street and a premature death.

Four students from Martin Luther King, for example, were murdered over the summer within a four-block radius of the school building, he said.

In Tucson, Ariz., education officials faced with deep cuts to sports and other extracurricular programs rallied round their high school teams by eliminating ninth-grade sports altogether and instituting a pay-to-play plan for the rest.

The plan has met with mixed success. Last year, students paid $60 if they wanted to participate in fine arts programs, such as band, debate and drama, and $105 to play sports. Parents complained, said Sheila Baize, director of extracurricular programs for the Tucson Unified School District, Arizona's second largest. Students spoke with their feet; some 2,000 of them walked away from the extracurricular programs, Dr. Baize said.

This year the fees were reduced to $30 for fine arts and $50 for one season of one sport; ninth-grade programs were restored. The extra revenue came from a $300,000 state budget reallocation; more was raised by a private, nonprofit group in Tucson, the Educational Enrichment Foundation. 'Scholarships' Offered

For students who wanted to participate but were unable to pay, the foundation offered "scholarships" to cover the fees, Dr. Baize said. Nonetheless, she added, there were students who would not ask for financial help although they needed it. "Any time you have to ask for a dollar amount to participate in any educational activity, you automatically restrict some students from participating," she said.

In Lorain, Ohio, school officials decided to borrow $650,000 from the state after the elimination of sports brought protests from parents and moved scores of students to leave the district. But the restoration of sports and other extracurricular activities came too late for this football season, said Mr. Bollin, the superintendent.

The special school levy will again go before the voters on Tuesday. Hopes are that this time it will pass.

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A version of this article appears in print on November 3, 1991, on Page A4 of the National edition with the headline: SPECIAL REPORT; School Sports' Last Rah-Rah?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe